Manchester the Sodom of the North- So What?
Manchester's Canal Street has been a celebrated and openly gay district of the city for some decades. Photograph: Don Mcphee
In the summer of 2003 I sat down with the young actor Bruno Langley to discuss the impending coming-out of his character Todd Grimshaw, onCoronation Street. The actor, publicity team, executive producer and individual scriptwriter were all visibly nevous about this storyline, one that would lock Langley down in history as the soap's first regular actor to play an openly gay man.
For any gay Mancunian (such as me) this small revolution appeared long overdue. During the 90s, an explosion in popularity of Manchester's gay bars and clubs in and a very visible presence of openly gay men and women citywide had forklifted its subculture out of the margins.
By 2000 I had cousins who wanted to go out in "the gay village". The word "gay" itself had changed. It no longer represented a threat; it represented fun. This was a seismic shift in local culture. The long shadow cast over gay Manchester by its chief of police James Anderton, describing gay men as "swimming in a cesspit of their own making" in the 80s was starting to disappear. Coronation Street was not just reflecting the times in 2003. It was catching up with them.
It was horrifying, then, to read a diatribe unleashed by the august art critic Brian Sewell in today's Daily Mail, complaining about the number of gay characters in the show now. Were his words meant to echo those of Anderton? They read clearly and unequivocally. "Is it true that the lives of heterosexual Mancunians are haplessly intertwined with transvestites, transsexuals, teenage lesbians and a horde of homosexuals across the age range," he asked, despairingly. Yes, Brian, in 2011 I'm afraid it is. Honestly, go there.
Since Todd's coming out, Corrie's producers have displayed an uncompromised, committed, witty, reverent dedication to representing the city's many gay brethren. They've done it faithfully to the local dialect and spirit. When Gail Tilsley had a cat fight on the street with perennial sparring partner Eileen Grimshaw, after Todd's coming out, his brother Jason arrived in full builder's regalia (hard hat, hi-vis vest) and Gail delivered one of its immortal lines: "Two more and you've got the whole of the Village People."
Moments of groundbreaking dramatic content have since quietly passed. The first gay septuagenarian was introduced to soap in the form of Gail's dad, Ted. Corrie's most longstanding gay character, knicker-factory employee Sean Tully, fathered a child. Schoolgirl lesbianism – a storyline frequently played for titillation on Hollyoaks – has most recently been handled with love, care and affectionate attention to detail. "You like Mary Queen of Shops," mum Sally chastised herself after daughter Sophie came out, "She's one of them".
If Sewell believes that there is a disproportionate number of transvestites (one straight) and transsexuals (one married: Hayley) then he ought to tack a trip 45 minutes down the road to Blackpool on to his whistlestop tour of the new, hairnet-free north, and have a peak at Basil Newby's Funny Girls, the monopoly night-time entertainment empire with its immaculate cast list of acid-tongued local trannies.
Stepping up to the times was a seismic shift for Coronation Street. Corrie's founder, Tony Warren, famously had to dress up his own openly gay sensibility and stitch it into the hemline of female characters when he created the show in the 1950s, lending a colourful line of Corrie women the tart vocabulary of the New Union pub on Canal Street. Tennessee Williams did the high art version of the same thing on the Broadway stage. Them were the times, as Ena Sharples might once have put it.
This is not the first time tacit homophobia has been flung toward the expert team that put together Coronation Street. The Sun ran a recent online poll: "Is Coronation Street too gay?", and certain newspaper columnists have expressed horrified indignation at gay affection being shown on the soap before the watershed. The same refrain is always echoed: what about the kids watching?
When I sat down with the actors playing Corrie's delightfully plausible teen lesbians Sophie and Sian earlier this year, they regaled me with excited tales of correspondence they received on a daily basis, from young men and women questioning their sexuality who had been granted permission to open dialogue at home about it because of their fictional characters. They said the letters and emails frequently reduced them both to tears.
With no small irony, Coronation Street has its own inbuilt, Sewell-esque figure in the form of buttoned-up, sexually indeterminate bachelor Norris Cole. Cole tragically bleats from behind the counter of Rita's Kabin about the liberalisation of his younger neighbours.
"Is Manchester now the Sodom of the north?" asked Sewell, in precisely the manner of Norris. It is a bit, yes. Sorry.
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